Raised Garden Bed

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I am still very much a novice gardener. I began gardening two years ago as a coping mechanism when my mom was diagnosed with cancer (don’t worry, she’s OK now), and I quickly discovered how much I love it. There really is no better therapy. I started off easy that year by moving some existing plants around that were already at my house and then adding some low maintenance annuals; my ongoing plan has been to try to add more to my gardens every year.

My big project for this year has been adding a vegetable garden!

It’s important to note here that until a few weeks ago I had no place to put a vegetable garden, and honestly everything in life was so busy at the beginning of this year that I wasn’t even sure if I was going to get around to planting one—and then everything changed when we were all hit with the COVID-19 pandemic in March. Suddenly, I had nothing but time. One afternoon about two weeks ago, my kids decided they were ready to plant their vegetables, but we still had nowhere for them. I knew I wanted a raised bed because drainage is really an issue in my backyard, and since my sweet husband felt so bad for the kids being stuck at home lately (because everything is closed right now) he immediately jumped on making a raised bed for their vegetable gardens.

I wasn’t planning on making a blog post out of this, but I love the way it turned out so much that I thought I would share.

Materials:

• Four 2×12 boards, 14′ long
• Six 6-inch corner braces
• 16 wooden stakes
• Wood screws
• Cardboard (or some other type of weed and grass barrier)
• A lot of soil

Steps:

Cutting: The first thing he did was cut the wood to the dimensions he wanted. He only cut two of the boards, so we ended up with two 14’ boards, two 11’ boards, and two 3’ boards. This is a quick diagram to show the dimensions we used (don’t judge my drawing too harshly):

Burning the Wood: This step is completely optional. Steve burnt the wood with this giant torch to give it a dark finished look that he really likes. Obviously you could stain the wood instead or just seal it.

Updated: thanks to a comment from a sweet friend, I just learned that this technique of burning the wood actually helps prevent rot so the beds will last longer. Win, win! (Like I said, I’m very much a novice with all of this.)

Assembly: This part was a little tricky. He balanced all the boards on each other and then went around to screw all the corners together. It probably would’ve been easier without a six year old and a four year old “helping,” but that wasn’t going to happen.

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Next, he went around and added the metal brackets to all the corners. I didn’t get a very good picture of this step, but you can see one of the metal brackets in the corner behind him in this picture:

Wooden Stakes: The last thing he did was to hammer wooden stakes inside of the bed, for reinforcement. He attached them to the bed with wood screws. We used 16 stakes total.

As you can see in the picture below, Steve had a lot of help with the stakes from our six year old. He’s so lucky 🙂

Weed Barrier: We used cardboard as our weed barrier. At the time, it had been about two weeks since we had taken anything to the recycling center, so we had a pretty decent size pile built up.

Finally we added gardening soil to the bed. It took a lot.

Our original plan for planting seeds was to go with a square foot garden type of model, but we let the kids plant a lot of the seeds so that plan didn’t really work out. I’m not even 100% sure what ended up where, so it’ll be interesting if/when things start to grow. Here they are each watering their own side of the garden.

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This ended up being a really fun family project… and of course when I say “family project” I mean Steve did most of the work while the kids “helped” and I tried to keep them from undoing everything he was working on. Fun times though.